Pick-Up Time at Oakdale Elementary School: Work and Family from the Vantage Points of Children
description- – Children are visible in the literature on work and family, but their presence is mostly passive, framed by their economic and emotional dependence, by their need for adult labor and time, and by "developmental outcomes" correlated with various arrangements for their care. This paper, based on collaborative fieldwork in a mixed-income, ethnically diverse area of Oakland, lays out a broader view. It considers economic, social, and cultural changes that are altering the dynamics of contemporary childhoods; and it draws upon theories of care to illuminate the moving dialectic of child and adult agency involved in the process of growing up. These themes are brought into analytic focus through an interrelated set of concepts??caring projects, caring processes, and reading signs of care. The paper concludes by arguing that the study of work and family is under-theorized and too narrowly defined and by suggesting strategies for re-visioning this field of study.
- – 1999-01-01
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Too Old for Child Care? Too Young for Self-Care?:Negotiations Between Preteens and Their Employed Parents
description- – Issues of work/family conflict and child care have been addressed mainly with regard to families with young children. When children advance to middle school at age ten or eleven, families usually must make new after-school arrangements, in a context of limited options and lack of consensus about appropriate care. Based on interviews with thirty-six preteens and with forty-two of their working-class through upper-middle-class parents in a California city, this paper examines their negotiations about the after-school hours. The transition to middle school entailed an abrupt decline in school-based care resources and school-to-parent communication and emboldened most of the preteens to assert more autonomy. Some working families pieced together complicated plans for after-school coverage; others slipped into "self-care" arrangements, usually despite parents' misgivings. In analyzing ideological and structural factors that affect the negotiations, I employ the concepts growing-up schedule and care reduction schedule. Four short case studies illustrate how preteens and parents tried to speed up or slow down these schedules. Proposing the concept of an optimal care mix, I discuss how middle schools and their communities can become more responsive to the needs of working families.
- – 1999-11-01
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Now Serving Advancement Possibilities: The Time-Pressured Work and Family Lives of Middle-Class Managers of Fast-Food Restaurants
description- – This paper examines the cases of five fast-food managers, focusing on the challenges of mobility in the secondary job market and how the weekly time commitment of fifty to sixty hours of management work, which often extends workweeks to six days, places pressure on family life. Despite these challenges and time pressures, the fast-food managers remain positive about the firm and advancement possibilities within it. This paper takes up the question of why these managers would tolerate unfair labor conditions and remain reluctant to challenge the family/work "time bind" and money squeeze in which the firm has placed them (Hochschild 1997). Their primary responsibilities of making customers and workers happy and advocating the potential for advancement tend to repress grievances against the firm's intention of getting the most labor out of them for as little cost as possible. Bounded by the possibility of a promotion, managers are also averse to blaming the firm for exacting significant time costs in exchange for their higher salaries. The wait for potential possibilities urges them to offer present sacrifices for a future still unknown to them. They may talk about various financial challenges or time constraints and the toll these take on family life, but they fail to identify that the firm's low cost labor strategy is responsible for their difficulties and the delay in achieving a better life.
- – 1999-10-01
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"I Raised My Kids on the Bus": Transit Shift Workers'Coping Strategies for Parenting
description- – The study investigated the coping strategies for parenting of transit shift workers, an urban, blue-collar, primarily ethnic minority population. It involved a qualitative, grounded theory approach, using individual interviews with 30 San Francisco bus drivers.The principal aspect of the job impacting transit workers in their relationships with their children was the lack of time they had to spend together. Coping strategies for care fell into categories of physical maintenance and expressions of caring. Physical maintenance included taking children on the bus, working shifts complementary to those of spouses, leaving children with extended family, using siblings as surrogate parents, placing children in formal child care, and leaving children home alone. Expressions of caring involved job timing, contact while at work, material gifts, job pride, role models, and separation of work from family.Research and policy implications follow. Regarding research, shift work cannot simply be grouped as one composite. Shift-working doctors and nurses may not formulate the same parental caring strategies as bus drivers. One policy suggestion is for shorter shifts: 6 hours per day rather than the current 12 hours per day average.
- – 1999-08-01
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Children, Work, and Family: Some Thoughts on"Mother Blame"
description- – This paper addresses the question of how to study, talk, think, and write about children in studies of work and family in ways that are sensitive to the situations of both children and their parents. We ask, "Is it possible to put children in the center of our research without contributing, even if inadvertently, to the cultural tendency to blame mothers for `child outcomes'?" To address this problem, we argue for research that incorporates a feminist constructionism and the insights of a feminist sociological imagination.
- – 1999-04-01
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Mothering and Motherhood: A Decade Review
description- – Mothering and motherhood are the subjects of a rapidly expanding body of literature. Considered in this decade review are two predominant streams in this work. One is the theorizing of mothering and motherhood and the other is the empirical study of the mothering experience. Conceptual developments have been propelled particularly by feminist scholarship, including the increasing attention to racial ethnic diversity and practices. The conceptualizations of the ideology of intensive mothering and of maternal practice are among the significant contributions. Study of mothering has focused attention on a wide array of specific topics and relationships among variables, including, issues of maternal well-being, maternal satisfaction, and mothers' employment.
- – 1999-04-01
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Gendered Ideologies and Strategies: The Negotiation of the Household Division of Labor among Middle-class South Asian American Families
description- – In this paper, I examine the challenges faced by professional immigrant women and their families in terms of balancing the demands of work and home. I use the case of Indian Christian nurses from the state of Kerala who, starting in the late sixties, immigrated to the U.S. with their families. Because the nurses come first and are upwardly mobile while their spouses lose status in the immigration process, there is a drastic change in gender relations in these households. This shift in the immigrant households provides a fertile research opportunity to understand how these couples negotiate, challenge, and transform conventional gendered practices and discourses. The struggles around the household division of labor and child care of these American families will add to our understanding of the classic "double-shift" dilemmas of two job couples in the U.S. I relied on ethnographic and in-depth interviewing methods in conducting this research project. In order to understand the dynamics of gender relations in communal life, I spent eighteen months doing extensive participant observation in an Indian Orthodox Christian immigrant congregation in an urban area of the U.S. Using my ties in the congregation, I conducted fifty-eight interviews, which included twenty-nine couples.I divided the twenty-nine couples into archetypal households based on the domestic division of labor along the lines of housework, child care and financial decision making. They include the following four types: traditional households, where the women do the housework and child care and the men are in charge of the financial decision making, forced-help households, where the men are forced to share the child care, egalitarian households, where all aspects of domestic labor are shared and female-led households, where the women shoulder almost all the labor in the household, including the financial decision making. I analyze how the division of labor varies with participation in the labor market on the one hand and connections back home to Kerala on the other.
- – 1999-04-01
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The Meaning of Food To Kids in Working Families
collectiondate- – 1999-04-01
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Parental Strategies for Increasing Child Well-being: The Case of Elementary School Choice
description- – This paper presents a theoretical model of the way mothers (or primary caregivers) allocate their time and money resources toward the production of child quality and other commodities. Using data collected through 29 open-ended interviews of parents with elementary school age children, I describe parents' strategies for choosing an elementary school. The example of elementary school choice is used to highlight parents' ability to substitute time for money in the production of child quality. In particular, many parents use their time to negotiate the public school bureaucracy to receive the public school and/or the teacher of their choice. The ability to work the public school system to one's children's benefit is strongly associated with socioeconomic background, with poorly educated single mothers appearing to be the least able advocate for their children. Wealthy and busy parents usually do not make big efforts to negotiate the public school system either, because they are able to purchase private school education for their children. Parents who opt for private schools have chosen to use more money (or market good) resources relative to their time to provide their children with a quality education.
- – 1999-04-01
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Work as Family: The Workplace as Repository of Women's Unmet Emotional Needs
collectiondate- – 2000-01-01
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Care and Freedom
description- – This paper first summarizes the debate between the development enthusiasts and the development skeptics in the fields of human development and development ethics. Development enthusiasts consider development as freedom, but for the skeptics it is a form of coercion. I differentiate two types of freedom: external and internal. Freedom to and freedom from (the former classified as positive and the latter as negative) both refer to the external domain. The literature on deve lopment so far deals only with the external concept of freedom. I classify development theory, based on this concept of freedom, as type I and discuss the limitations of such an approach to development by re-examining the case of the Rajasthani widow much discussed in the development literature. I draw upon experience of the West with this type of development to highlight the problems faced there. I enumerate the ill effects of the pursuit of external freedom in the form of competitive individualism (ignoring the strengths of a selftranscending, care-oriented way of being and raising children), which forms the basis for type I development in order to issue a word of caution before proceeding with this approach in the case of India and other Third World countries. Finally, I present the alternative concept of freedom, viz., the search for inner freedom based on the advaitic philosophy in India. Drawing upon the work of culture theorists, I contrast the familial self in India based on this conception of freedom with the individual self of the West. In India the practices of child care have evolved from this concept of freedom and self. Using this notion of freedom, I lay out the framework for type II development, concluding that it will not be possible to work for type II development if we continue with the corporate form of production guided by the profit motive, advertisements, and a wasteful use of resources. Hence the focus of the development debate should shift from culture to the system of production. The East will have to join forces with the movements in the West working for a new work system, as opposed to the "job work" that prevails today.
- – 2000-10-01
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The Time Bind and God's Time
description- – We address the question of whether family time constraints lead Americans in the 1990s to cut back on their religious activities. Using the 1988-1998 General Social Surveys, we looked at the answers to several questions about church membership and activities of married respondents, aged 55 or less, living in households with at least one employed spouse. We compared respondents by class, by whether or not they had children at home, and by how many hours spouses worked each week (and we controlled for several other factors - age, gender, ethnicity, income, and religion of origin). Having children and working many hours are the key indices of time pressure. In general, we found that Americans sustained their religious involvements despite high work commitments; and we found that parents were more involved than nonparents. Two notable exceptions arose: One, among middle-class couples only, high work hours - especially for wives' - depressed couples' church attendance (it is not clear why this was specific to the middle class). Two, long work hours reduced attendance and certain devotional activities among wives. The general pattern, however, suggests that religious activity was relatively inelastic to time pressures.
- – 2000-10-01
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Toward a Sociology of (Gendered) Disgust: Perceptions of the Organic Body and the Organization of Care Work
description- – Based on a reinterpretation of a study of 105 relationships between homebound dependent fathers and mothers and their adult sons and daughters, this article discusses incontinence as a social and cultural phenomenon. Care work has other people's bodies as its working field. The social norms and cultural symbols that surround the intimate parts of the body affect the way care work is organized, gendered, culturally understood, and socially stratified. To lose bodily control and the capacity to keep the disgust related to bodily fluids hidden from the eyes of others, seems to put the individual's identity and human dignity at risk. The disturbing presence of odors, sights, and textures seem to have a disruptive effect on close relationships. The article further discusses how bodily dimensions of care add new burdens to modern family life in different social contexts, and contribute to expand the gap between men and women in different cultures of care. This seems to be related to how ideas of individualism structure are structured by the economic and social conditions in which people live their everyday lives.
- – 2000-10-01
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Cultures of Complaint in Japan and the United States
description- – Complaints are a ubiquitous but understudied feature of life in modern societies. This paper discusses the consequentiality of culture for complaining. It is a first step in generating a theory of why and how people complain that aims to serve as both a tool for cross-cultural analysis and an index of power within social relations. Data for this study are contrasted examples of complaints in Japan and the United States. At the level of national culture, there are obvious, stereotypical differences: the U.S. is a culture of complaint; Japan is a culture of restraint. Analysis of interview data collected from comparable subcultural groups (dual-income, middle-class parents of young children) finds, however, that expected cross-cultural differences in complaint are less significant than the observed similarities. Japanese female respondents in particular initiated complaints more often and complained more aggressively than hypothesized, suggesting that the salience of emic cultural categories, such as yome (bride) and shujin (master) is diminishing. I theorize that this emergent gender equality of complaints is a manifestation of the global, postindustrial, gender culture that is gradually trumping national and local cultures as the primary determinant of the"what,""why,"and"how"of complaint. This theory suggests that genderbased power differences will continue to decline in Japan.
- – 2000-10-01
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'Soccer Moms' and the New Care Work
description- – Contemporary mothers are engaged in modern motherhood: holding employment and rearing children concurrently. Further, modern mothers seek to secure for their children the modernized childhood, which involves a high degree of involvement by children in extracurricular lessons, sports, and other activities. Coordinating these activities constitutes the new maternal care work. Based on in-depth interviews with 23 northern California employed, married, middle-class mothers, I examine how mothers manage their families' busy schedules and monitor their children's daily lives. I investigate mothers' strategies for managing their everyday lives in the context of time. Three strategies of action predominate: managing time, scaling back, and using help.
- – 2000-08-01
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Three Dimensional Families: Public, Private and Social Life Among San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Teenagers and Their Parents
description- – While much work-family literature is concerned with identity formation, it ignores civic and religious life and assumes that work and family are the primary sources for the construction of meaning. This study of Jewish identity among teenagers and their parents introduces a third, community dimension into the emerging work-family model of identity. I conducted open-ended interviews with 16 teenagers and 19 parents in 14 middle and upper-middle-class observant Jewish families. Most of my respondents, in both generations, seek in Jewish rituals and social networks a sense of emotional connection with one another and with other Jews. The results of this outreach depend on the family's larger approach to identity building and on the characteristics of the community they belong to. "Communalist" families construct solidarity and meaning through active, joint involvement in synagogues and other Jewish organizations. In these families, father, mother, and children share a desire for emotional connection through Jewish identity; and they are immersed in a Jewish community large and diverse enough to contain within its boundaries the opportunity for teenagers to form friendships and develop individual interests. But a substantial minority of families combines an "individualist" with a "familist" approach, where top priority is given to the competing commitments of individual family members to school, work, or hobbies, although individual obligations are periodically set aside to spend time at home with one another. In these families, community-building efforts are sporadic and easily derailed when their synagogues lack the resources to satisfy their desire for emotional connection.
- – 2000-08-01
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Contours of Childhood: Social Class Differences in Children's Daily Lives
description- – rearing and family life. Although all parents want children to obtain success and happiness, they differ in the ways they define their own roles in their children's lives as well as in how they perceive the nature of childhood. The middle-class parents in this study appear to follow a pattern of "concerted cultivation." They enroll children in numerous age-specific organized activities that come to dominate family life and create enormous labor for parents, especially mothers. Parents also stress the development of reasoning. This "cultivation" approach to raising children creates a frenetic pace for parents, imposes an enormous stress on performance on children, and creates a cult of individualism within the family. I support this conceptualization with observational data from case studies of white and black families with children in the third and fourth grade.Although there are important variations among the working-class and poor families, these two groups' approaches to raising children are quite similar, and both are distinct from the middle-class families' strategies. My "conceptual umbrellas" provide a way of thinking about differences in family life, both those I observed in my study and those that have been documented in the literature. There are important variations within social classes, including differences between black and white middle-class families. But there are also important areas of life that appear relatively indifferent to social class. The importance of social class should not be overstated. The class differences I found in children's family lives provide uneven resources for family members as they seek to comply with the standards of dominant institutions. The pattern of concerted cultivation, with its stress on the organization of individual repertoires of activities, reasoning, and questioning, encourages an emerging sense of entitlement in children.Not all parents and children are equally assertive, but the pattern of questioning and intervening I witnessed among middle-class parents contrasts sharply with the definitions of how to be helpful and effective that I observed among working-class and poor families. Here, the pattern of the accomplishment of natural growth, with its stress on child-initiated play, autonomy from adults, and directives, created an emerging sense of constraints. The various strategies employed by children and parents are not equally valuable. The customized interactions of middle-class parents and children appear to offer potential advantages. The data suggest individually insignificant but cumulatively potentially important class differences in advantages that lie not only in the advantages parents are able to obtain for their children, but also in the skills being transmitted to children for negotiating their own paths in the world.
- – 2000-08-01
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The Culture of Concern and Family Economy Among Working Latino Youth
description- – This paper focuses on Latino youth who work as a way to participate in and contribute to the family economy. Based on forty in-depth interviews conducted with Latino youth in Oakland, California, this discussion examines working children in Latino immigrant families and the cultural and social aspects of their decision to help support the family. Research findings reveal children's participation in the family economy that contradicts the perception of children as totally dependent subjects and the ultimate objects of family care. Working children in immigrant families were active agents, earning and contributing to the family's welfare and wellbeing. Although the financial need was evident, parents in Latino immigrant families never directly required or demanded that their children work for the family's sake. Rather, the youths' motivations to work derived from a general culture of concern practiced and understood by many Latino families in this study. This culture of concern was based on a tradition of respect and reciprocity central to the collective survival strategies that Latinos have relied upon for generations. Although many families studied did cohere collectively for survival, there were critical gender differences among the youths' meanings for their financial contributions. Finances were a concern for both male and female youth in my research, but Latina (female) youth recognized that family financial problems were considerably weightier for their mothers because cultural traditions and social conditions tended to shift the burden of child rearing as well as financial support in their direction. Latino (male) youth were as tuned into financial problems, but rarely indicated how sexist oppression intensified the pressure their mothers endured while addressing these problems. Finally, because of a decrease in state support and increase in economic pressure, many children in these Latino immigrant families were participating in a "multiple earner" strategy necessary to remain at a basic subsistence level. Without an increase in state support and a general improvement in wages, immigrant children will continue to work for the family's survival instead of devoting this time and energy to studying or saving for college and ascending into the middle class.
- – 2000-06-01
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Historical, Cultural, and Emotional Meanings: Interviews with Young Girls in Three Generations
description- – People use cultural concepts to organize and construct their social worlds. The question asked in this paper is how such constructions are infused with personal meaning and emotions from specific psychobiographies, and how this may facilitate or impede cultural and social changes, for instance, in the form of what one could call a certain inner psychological readiness for some discourses and not for others, for some structural changes and not for others. With examples from an on-going study of young girls in three generations the paper discusses the relations between historical context, discursive constructions, and emotional reality as they appear in texts of interviews. The interaction between these three levels of meaning is also illustrated by an analysis of the housewife of the 1950s.
- – 2001-01-01
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